About the Speaker's

Dr. Claudia Contini, Imperial College

Claudia Contini is currently a Lecturer in Biotechnology and BBSRC Fellow in The Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, working in bottom-up synthetic biology. She had her Master’s degree in medical chemistry at the University of Padua, Italy and a PhD in Physical Chemistry at the University College London, UK. This has been followed by a postdoctoral position focused on investigating the interactions at the bio-nano interface at Imperial College London (ICL). She then obtained an ISSF Fellowship (ICL, UK) to create innovative protocells and the award of a prestigious L’Oréal-UNESCO UK Fellowship and BBSRC Fellowship. Multiple awards have recognised her research, including the ‘Italy Made Me’ award from the Italian Ambassador in London to recognise her innovative research carried out in the UK. She is also co-Director of the Association of the Italian Scientist in the UK (AISUK) and IUPAC National Representative of the Physical and Biophysical Chemistry Division.

Prof. Sarah Harris, University of Sheffield

SAH is a computational biophysicist with an interest in understanding how biomolecules perform their extraordinary functions within the constraints of the laws of physics. She uses atomistic and coarse-grained simulations to study biomolecular mechanics, which often requires new simulation methods to be developed. She enjoys using High Performance Computing, and building multidisciplinary scientific communities around these facilities.

Dr. Darius Koester, University of Warwick

Darius Koester is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Mechanochemcial Cell Biology at the University of Warwick working on questions concerning cell surface mechanics. His group develops methods to study active membrane systems in cells as well as in 2D and 3D minimal systems combined with mechanical manipulation with the aim to understand the role of cortex-membrane interactions in membrane tension regulation and mechano-signalling in live cells.

After studying Physics at University of Leipzig, Darius joined 2007 the groups of Patricia Bassereau (Physics) and Christophe Lamaze (Biology) at Institut Curie (Paris) for a PhD supervised by Pierre Nassoy. He employed optical tweezers to measure cell membrane tension in combination with micro-mechanical, biochemical, and genetic manipulations to decipher the role of Caveolae, cell membrane invaginations, as a buffer for cell membrane tension, protecting the cell plasma membrane from rupture.

This was followed in 2011 by a postdoc with Satyajit (Jitu) Mayor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (Bangalore). Here, he designed and did set up a minimal system of acto-myosin networks connected to supported lipid bilayers to study the effect of the active, remodelling actin network on the dynamics and clustering of membrane proteins. He could show that this minimal system constitutes an active composite system displaying increased membrane molecule clustering and dynamics, which corroborated a novel theoretical model developed by Madan Rao to understand protein clustering in the cell plasma membrane.

In 2017, he moved to Warwick University to work with Mohan Balasubramanian on the reconstitution of the cytokinetic ring machinery and started his own group in 2018 as an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Mechanochemical Cell Biology.

François Nédélec, University of Cambridge

PhD, Princeton and ESPCI Paris 1998

Group Leader EMBL, Heidelberg

Currently Group Leader @ SLCU, Cambridge University.

Francois was trained applied math and physics, and conducts research focused on Cell and Developmental Biology. His group employs experimental and theoretical approaches to study a variety of cytoskeletal functions, often in collaboration, most recently the mitotic spindle within the consortium BioMecaNet. His group develops the widely used Open-Source simulation software Cytosim.